CEN12LA113 · Cessna 182J
Mentone Flying Club Cessna 182J · Accident: hard landing
From Rice Lake Regional Airport - Carl's Field (RPD) to Saint Paul Downtown Holman Field (STP)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12LA113
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Cessna 182J
- Aircraft type
- Cessna 182
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N2618F
- Operator
- Mentone Flying Club
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rice Lake Regional Airport - Carl's Field (RPD), Rice Lake, WITo Saint Paul Downtown Holman Field (STP), St. Paul, MN
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Hard landing
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Although the tower air traffic controller informed the pilot that the wind was from 230 degrees, the pilot elected to land on runway 14 instead of runway 27. He reported that the visual approach was stabilized as he approached the runway landing zone. However, the airplane encountered a gust of wind during the landing flare and landed hard on its nose on the runway centerline about 500 to 1,000 feet from the runway threshold. Postaccident examination of the airplane revealed that the firewall was bent. The pilot reported that there was no mechanical malfunction or failure of the airplane. Five minutes after the accident, the reported surface wind was 240 degrees at 19 knots gusting to 26 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to land on a runway with a gusting, quartering tailwind and his inadequate compensation for the wind, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12LA113
- Event ID
- 20111227X15745
- Case number
- CEN12LA113
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: a8abaa0a4e4fda9a844481294ab28e554a771034de63ad901e69783cb331b6a5; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:01:34.717Z.